Waiting list crisis as ward closures help NHS to bank £510m

Statistics from the Department of Health show a surplus of £510 million at the end of the last financial year.

There was also £450 million held in a contingency fund by health authorities.

This surplus has been achieved by a series of drastic cutbacks, redundancies, ward closures and by raiding training budgets for staff after Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt made getting the financial accounts healthy the top priority for the NHS.

Although the health service as a whole has a surplus there are still a significant number of trusts in debt to the total of £911million.

As revealed last month the NHS in London has a surplus of £ 92million despite an agreement with the Department of Health that the region could return a deficit.

Critics have said that a surplus does not translate as a success story because that money should have been spent on patient care and indicates cutbacks were unnecessarily harsh.

Unions warn this turnaround has been achieved too fast and patient care has suffered. A leaked memo from government officials shows the financial measures has also hit the target of treating patients within 18 weeks of being referred by GPs.

To save money many trusts imposed a minimum wait time and now treat fewer patients in the year.

The memo shows the Department of Health is so worried that patient waiting times in excess of one year will be highlighted by the media that they have issued guidance on how to spin the data.

This key Government target is likely to be missed.

Ministers will today say the NHS is in its "strongest financial position for many years" but will admit that action still needs to be taken in the individual trusts that have deficits.

There are a dozen trusts that cannot balance their books month- by- month meaning their underlying debt is still rising.

Tory health spokesman Andrew Lansley said today that Labour had gone for "indiscriminate cuts".

He added: "Cutting education and training and plundering public health budgets is not the way to manage the future of our NHS.

The Tories say the NHS has been financially mismanaged by Labour to such an extent that services are being restricted. About 9,000 beds have been closed along with 38,000 NHS jobs cuts in the past 12 months.

"Patients were told they couldn't have operations until the end of the financial year; PCTs have had their budgets cut to pay for others stuck in deficit.

"Yet Labour parade this surplus as a good news story. Well it is not good news for NHS staff and patients who will inevitably pay for it in the years to come," he said.

In 2005/2006, the NHS recorded a £547 million deficit." On top of today's figures, more surpluses are expected from foundation hospital trusts, which are independent of Whitehall.